Antonín Dvorák's first efforts at song writing, put together as the 1865 song cycle Cypresses, were heartfelt ones but not, in the end, particularly successful. The songs of this early cycle remained dear to Dvorák throughout his life (the impetus for writing them was a deeply personal one), however, and he drew upon them more than once while composing later works, reshaping and remolding them in his more mature image. The string quartet Cypresses of 1887 are, naturally, related music, as are the Six Songs and Four Songs of 1881-2; only with the revision of eight Cypresses songs into the Love Songs, Op. 83 of 1889, however, did Dvorák succeed in providing this—his earliest surviving vocal music—with a vessel of real and lasting popularity.

The Cypresses, and therefore the eight Love Songs, Op. 83, are all settings of romantic poems by Gustav Pfleger-Moravsky. Throughout Op. 83 there are vestiges of youthful indulgences that Dvorák was loathe to utterly erase from his darling Cypresses—remnants of the gangly young man who had never before written songs and who had only an average command of accompanimental textures. But the music has a glowing passion to it that almost inevitably pushes such complaints into the back of the mind.

Op. 83, No. 1 basks in a warm A major; here the ternary form that Dvorák loves to use in his songs works well—the rolling triplets of the middle portion contrast nicely with the expansive melody of the opening and closing sections. In the second song, the cold and empty musings on death (Dvorák's piano figuration is appropriately icy) are broken up by the rich, chordal realm of dreams. The melancholy of No. 3 is peculiarly light and airy; the D flat major of No. 4 thick and rich. No. 5 was, interestingly enough, originally in duple meter; in Op. 83 Dvorák recasts it in a spinning 3/8—so effective that one imagines Dvorák being surprised to have not thought of it sooner. No. 7 was originally in the major mode, but Dvorák (perhaps wiser for his 20-some years more experience) rewrote it in minor (though the first chord is, deceptively, a major one). Warm A major is rekindled in the final Love Song as the poet declares eternal devotion to the beloved.

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